Alternative Awaiting and Broadcast for Two-Way Relay Fading Channels

We investigate a two-way relay (TWR) fading channel based on store-and-forward (SF), where two source nodes wish to exchange information with the help of a relay node. A new upper bound on the ergodic sum-capacity for the TWR fading system is derived when delay tends to infinity.We further propose two alternative awaiting and broadcast (AAB) schemes: pure partial decoding (PPD) with SF-I and combinatorial decoding (CBD) with SF-II, which approach the new upper bound at high SNR with unbounded and bounded delay respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed AAB schemes significantly outperform the traditional physical layer network coding (PLNC) methods without delay. Compared to the traditional TWR schemes without delay, the proposed CBD with SF-II method significantly improves the maximum sum-rate with an average delay of only some dozen seconds in the relay buffer.